FREDERICK THE GREAT AND JEAN LE ROND D'ALEMBERT ON PHILOSOPHY, TRUTH, AND POLITICS

The prize question of the Berlin Academy of Sciences for 1780, on the utility of deception, has attracted both controversy and scholarly interest. Yet very little attention has been dedicated to the question's peculiar beginnings in the correspondence between the philosopher and mathematician Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, in a discussion concerning the expulsion of the Jesuits from France. This correspondence not only reveals the prize question's complex genealogy in long-standing debates on the true ends of philosophy, but also helps revise conventional frameworks for understanding the relationship between philosophy and politics in Enlightenment Europe. Far from an adornment intended to boost the ‘Enlightened’ credentials of an absolutist king, d'Alembert held the momentum in this relationship, and recruited Frederick to his own campaign of promoting publicly useful philosophy. ‘Philosophy’ here amounted to a commitment to the truth and its public defence, rather than subscription to or belief in a specific set of ideas or political reforms. Placing pressure on rulers to disavow deceitful politics, the far-reaching implications of this conception of philosophy for political life were no less ambitious than the agendas espoused by protagonists of a supposed ‘radical Enlightenment’.

Many thanks are due to Avi Lifschitz for judicious reading and feedback on earlier versions of this piece, as well as to the journal's two anonymous reviewers for their comments. All translations – and errors – are my own.

Footnotes

Many thanks are due to Avi Lifschitz for judicious reading and feedback on earlier versions of this piece, as well as to the journal's two anonymous reviewers for their comments. All translations – and errors – are my own.

7 The exception to this was when the crown saw it fit to use the contests to canvass for specific ideas and expertise. In such cases, the crown's involvement in the setting of the question would be explicitly announced. This happened sufficiently frequently for it not to have been unusual to academicians or entrants, and, famously, was the means by which the French crown established a system of street lighting in Paris. See Caradonna, Jeremy L., The Enlightenment in practice: academic prize contests and intellectual culture in France, 1670–1784 (Ithaca, NY, 2012), ch. 6. In fact, precisely such an extraordinary question, on ‘le secret de donner au sable la dureté & la solidité des pierres, & de le rendre par là propre à en faire des colonnes & des statues’, was announced at the same time as the question on the utility of deceit. See BBAW Archiv, Hist. Abt., MS i-vi-10, fo. 91v.

9 Their discussion and d'Alembert's insistence on pressing Frederick on the question of deceit in politics was all the more delicate owing to Frederick's own history as an erstwhile champion of anti-Machiavellian politics, in the form of his Anti-Machiavel, ou essai critique sur le Prince de Machiavel, published in September 1740. See Anti-Machiavel, ed. Bahner, Werner and Bergmann, Helga, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, xix (Oxford, 1996).

16 The correspondence between the philosophes and various crowned heads has conventionally been seen within the context of salon culture, in which the reading aloud and free circulation of letters among friends, associates, and attendees of the same salons was customary. On such practices and customs that governed salons, see Lilti, Antoine, Le monde des salons: sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2005); Goodman, Dena, The Republic of Letters: a cultural history of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1994), esp. ch. 4.

25Ibid., p. 192. Van Kley argues that it was at this precise argument that the Jansenist responders to d'Alembert's pamphlet took umbrage, for it diluted the Jansenists’ contribution to the Society's dissolution, attributing the real victory to reason and to philosophy, which the Jansenists had themselves energetically attacked. Van Kley, Expulsion of the Jesuits, p. 215.

26Hoekstra, Kinch, ‘The end of philosophy (the case of Hobbes)’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 106 (2005), pp. 25–62, esp. pp. 25–7, 56–62, makes an excellent methodological case for the need for interpreters of philosophical utterances to first determine what the authors or performers of those utterances sought to do, or, in other words, what philosophers sought to do in doing philosophy.

27 The challenges of studying ‘key words’ have been laid out in Skinner, Quentin, Visions of politics, i:Regarding method (Cambridge, 2002), ch. 9. See also Williams, Raymond, Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (Oxford, 1976).

28 For an overview of conceptions of philosophy and the breadth that the academic study of it encompassed, see for instance Werner Schneiders, ‘Concepts of philosophy’, and Koch, Carl Henrik, ‘Schools and movements’, in Haakonssen, Knud, ed., The Cambridge history of eighteenth-century philosophy (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 26–44 and 45–68 respectively; Van Damme, Stéphane, ‘Philosophe/philosopher’, in Brewer, Daniel, ed., The Cambridge companion to the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 153–66; idem, À toutes voiles vers la vérité: une autre histoire de la philosophie au temps des lumières (Paris, 2014), esp. the introduction and ch. 1; Benoist, Jocelyn, ‘La philosophie comme métier’, L'Aventure humaine. Savoirs, libertés, pouvoirs, 7 (1997), pp. 39–52. For an overview of the complications in the historiography of the history of philosophy stemming from this variety in meanings of ‘philosophy’, see Levitin, Dmitri, Ancient wisdom in the age of the new science: histories of philosophy in England, c. 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 4–12.

29Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française, 1st edn, ii (Paris, 1694), p. 230. See also the second volume of the following three editions, published in 1718, 1740, and 1762, on pp. 266, 328, and 366 respectively.

45 The Jesuits in France ran 85 collèges – more than half of all the French collèges – and 152 other educational establishments. This monopoly meant that their expulsion left the entire French education system in urgent need of reconstruction. Gill, Natasha, Educational philosophy in the French Enlightenment: from nature to second nature (Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2010), p. 229 n. 3. On the debates and consequences of this pre-revolutionary period of educational reform, see ibid., pp. 235–54.

46 No. 33, d'Alembert to Frederick, Paris, 14 Sept. 1766, p. 454. It is worth noting that it was another ruler, Catherine the Great, empress of Russia (1762–96), who was the most vocal in offering to sponsor the publication of the Encyclopédie when its completion appeared threatened by censorship and persecution in France in the 1760s. On this, see Wilson, Arthur M., Diderot (Oxford, 1972), chs. 33–4.

57 Frederick had insisted on appointing d'Alembert to the presidency of the Berlin Academy after the death of the incumbent Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, keeping the post vacant after Maupertuis's death, harbouring the hope that d'Alembert might accept the appointment. See for instance No. 16, Frederick to d'Alembert, Sans-Souci, 15/16 Aug. 1763, pp. 419–20, where Frederick declares ‘je conserverai la place de president de l'Academie, qui ne peut etre remplie que par lui’.

66 No. 67, Frederick to d'Alembert, 8 Jan, 1770, pp. 522–3. While certainly celebrated for his numerous literary and scientific achievements, Fontenelle had also acquired a significant place in francophone debates concerning the limits of education and Enlightenment, owing principally to the dictum Frederick had quoted. The neatness and literary and semantic flexibility of the metaphor made it a convenient topos through which to distance or align oneself with Fontenelle's position towards the masses. Like the oft-quoted aphorism on the freedom of speech often attributed to Voltaire, this line concerning the concealment of truths within one's hand has not been found in any of Fontenelle's surviving writings. Yet because even his contemporaries attributed it to him, there is no conclusive evidence to argue that it is apocryphal. See Mortier, Clartés et ombres, pp. 64, 69–71; Krauss, Werner, ed., Fontenelle und die Aufklärung (Munich, 1969); Crocker, L. G., ‘The problem of truth and falsehood in the age of Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 14 (1953), pp. 575–603, at pp. 579–80, 583.

79 This approach and dismissal of (in this case political) rhetoric as ‘flapdoodle’ was famously articulated in Namier, Lewis, ‘Human nature in politics’, in idem, Personalities and powers (London, 1955), pp. 1–7; and idem, The structure of politics at the accession of George III (2nd edn, London, 1957), preface and ch. 1, and roundly undermined in Skinner, Quentin, ‘The principles and practice of opposition: the case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole’, in McKendrick, N., ed., Historical perspectives: studies in English thought and society in honour of J. H. Plumb (London, 1974), pp. 92–128.

80 At the time of Frederick's intervention on 16 Oct. 1777, even the king's reader and close confidant Henri de Catt, and the Academy's perpetual secretary, Samuel Formey, appeared not to know the source of the question. See OFG, xxv, Appendix 4, de Catt to Formey, Potsdam, 16 Oct. 1777, p. 309. After the Academy had accepted the new question, Lagrange wrote to d'Alembert, ‘Vous aurez sans doute appris que Sa Majesté a fait proposer une autre question: S'il est utile de tromper le people.’ Only in d'Alembert's response to Lagrange did he reveal himself to be the origin of the question. See No. 150, Lagrange to d'Alembert, Berlin, 27 Jan. 1778, and No. 151, d'Alembert to Lagrange, Paris, 30 Mar. 1778, pp. 336–7. For Frederick's part, in response to a clarification from the Academy, he specifically conveyed his desire not to be named as the origin of the question. His orders were duly followed. See BBAW Archiv, Hist. Abt., MS i-vi-10, fos. 45r, 46r, 91r, 91v. Reactions to the contest suggest that both Frederick and d'Alembert's involvement remained undisclosed.

81 The debate on Popularphilosophie revolved around the relationship of the advancement of intellectual life and philosophy to the instruction of the masses, and it, too, touched on the true duties of the philosopher, as well as both ‘true philosophy’ and ‘true Enlightenment’ (wahre Aufklärung). On this, see for instance the contributions in Böning, Holger, Schmitt, Hanno, and Siegert, Reinhart, eds., Volksaufklärung. Eine praktische Reformbewegung des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Bremen, 2007); and Van Der Zande, Johan, ‘In the image of Cicero: German philosophy between Wolff and Kant’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 56 (1995), pp. 419–42. Furthermore, as Hans Adler points out, it is no coincidence that Rudolf Zacharias Becker, the writer and governor to the baron of Dachroeden in Erfurt who won the Academy's contest with an essay answering the question in the negative, later became a prominent Volksaufklärer. See Adler, ‘Preisfrage’, p. xv.

Many thanks are due to Avi Lifschitz for judicious reading and feedback on earlier versions of this piece, as well as to the journal's two anonymous reviewers for their comments. All translations – and errors – are my own.